Medicine Singers formed as a collaborative offshoot of the Eastern Medicine Singers, an Eastern Algonquin powwow group that performs traditional and contemporary American Indian music. The project was born from a spontaneous collaboration between guitarist Yonatan Gat and the Eastern Medicine Singers at SXSW 2017.

Powwow music is the foundation of Medicine Singers’ sound. Jamieson’s passion for preserving the culture and language of the Pocasset Wampanoag has been the driving force behind all his work in music. The Eastern Medicine Singers perform primarily in the Massachusett dialect of Algonquin, a language Jamieson studied with the late Clinton Wixon, a venerated tribal leader who was known as one of the last fluent speakers of the Wampanoag language. 

Photo: Slavko Pusavec

Gat rose to prominence as a member of the Israeli garage/punk band Monotonix. Monotonix were known for their wild live performances, which often saw the band radically deconstructing the traditions of contemporary rock and roll music. Gat immediately found a symbolic connection in the powwow performance style of the Eastern Medicine Singers, where the audience gathers in circular fashion around the powwow drum. “Monotonix broke with tradition because we just got bored with bands playing on stage. But by breaking away from this modern tradition, we connected to a more ancient tradition.”